The Assassination of Jamal Khashoggi | The Washington Post

on October 2nd 2018 Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi entered the Saudi consulate in Istanbul it would be the last time he was seen alive Mooji Solaris Anytus about the Romans any construe the common man a cotton chocolate occasionally Nestle Hilah Booya published a pseudo order insulin alcohol no Buddha Yabu najuk note we turn now to the disappearance raising alarms around the world a Saudi journalists or Washington Post contributor Saudi Arabia's Crown Prince told Bloomberg he has no idea what happened at Khashoggi the Central Intelligence Agency has already told the president who they think is accountable they believe that Mohammed bin Salman likely ordered the killing at ramappa show t they have nothing definitive and the fact is maybe he did maybe did ignoring the findings of America's intelligence services and coming to a conclusion that is totally unsupported by the facts makes no sense it's a big mistake the Trump administration has got this wrong [Music] we have a very important guest with us Jamel character the very prominent Saudi Journal welcome to Jamal for you thank you for having me here Jamal had a long and varied career in Saudi Arabia and and a lot of that time was spent quite close to the ruling circles and in fact you know the only time I ever spoke to him was when I was calling to get some sort of a government comment so he had this dual role of journalists and consummate insider and occasional spokesperson for the government something happened to Jamal the dream that he had the herb Arab world would be purified initially thought by this Muslim Revolution became an idea that it was really the openness values that he had as a journalist of telling the truth of holding leaders of these countries responsible that became his real passion Khashoggi believed the idealism of the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings and the upheaval they caused would lead to reforms taking hold in the region including in Saudi Arabia but the kingdom resisted the upheaval and in 2015 Mohammed bin Salman the young and ambitious Prince began accumulating power two years later when he was named crown prince the heir to the throne of his father King saman Muhammad's authority as Saudi Arabia's unchallenged ruler was all but assured it's after MBS comes to power that keshavjee starts becoming a more outspoken critic of his policies by this time he's no longer in the government and he's someone who is being on the one hand critical but all the same time you know not defamatory remarkable times in Saudi Arabia the hugely influential Sunni Muslim Kingdom there's been an unprecedented anti-corruption code by following the weakened arrest of dozens of Saudi Arabian princes and high-ranking officials it's also begun arrests in women's rights campaigners all of this was part of this unusually aggressive consolidation of power by the Crown Prince and then part of that consolidation has meant making sure he has no rivals and that he has no critics either inside the kingdom or outside the kingdom I just give a very quick answer to your question Saudi Arabia is a 100 years old monarchy and afraid of change whether the change coming for democracy or frog revolution for assorted another divide with the royal family occurred after the 2016 election of Donald Trump the kingdom welcome to the Republican presidents hardline stance toward Iran but keshavjee was critical he warned that Trump's anti-muslim rhetoric and apparent support of Russian President Vladimir Putin was a threat to Saudi interests increasingly isolated threatened and vilified khashoggi went into exile near Washington DC in June 2017 but it's harder to leave Saudi Arabia than it appears one of the first signals of that comes just a few months after his arrival in the United States Khashoggi is getting calls actually from Saudi officials who are connected to Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman one individual in particulars men named settled Al Qahtani and he's this very close ally of the Crown Prince is some people have described him even as a kind of Rasputin figure and at least one of those conversations we know of Zelda Kotani was is actually trying to get Jamal to come back to Saudi Arabia Khashoggi tells one of his friends essentially I'm not crazy there's no way I'm doing that in September 2017 keshavjee became a contributing columnist for The Washington Post so when I met him I actually didn't know at the time that he was already in the u.s. that first piece that he wrote in September was effectively he's sort of coming out peace to the world in which he was extremely honest about what was happening to his associates and colleagues so I think I found him at a time when he was ready to be bold [Music] he praised a lot of MBSs reforms he thought it was great that women could drive he thought it was great that the religious establishment in Saudi Arabia had been cut back but he wouldn't stop himself just because he supported some of the reforms from saying this leadership is autocratic it's behaving in a ruthless way it doesn't have respect for human rights for murder but he is gathering all power within his hand and it would be much better for him to allow a breathing space for critic for Cerruti intellectuals or early writers through the media to debate longtime dissidents for the royal family may have been you know sort of easier to dismiss clearly they were uncomfortable with his role as a foreign based critic of their policies with an especially loud platform at the Washington Post khashoggi knew his writings and his connections came with risks perhaps most problematic for Khashoggi where his links to an organization funded by Qatar Saudi Arabia's regional rival the post would later discover an executive at Qatar Foundation International had at times helped Khashoggi shape his columns it is not clear if the Saudi government was aware of khashoggi Chi's new connections in Washington in the end khashoggi underestimated what Saudi Arabia was capable of [Music] Jim Shirley German everybody Narada trundle sanam she religion Wilden satatam yeah the demand to kill a turkey an alien agenda elimination yahwah human mechanism yeah that because valid other hazardous and expanding dorm didn't Earth Day weekend edition ocean and yet the Baba's man sang they're very mad my stance today and Christians about Hydra educated in second he goes over to Turkey and he is there to marry his fiancee he needs to obtain paperwork from the Saudi government in order to complete that marriage so on that fateful day when he walks in he goes in on the one hand believing that he's there to obtain these documents but at the same time understanding because of what's happened in the weeks and months before that the Saudi government is paying very close attention to him and I think it's fair to say based on what he tells his friends he doesn't feel that the Saudi government has his best interest at heart we're gonna move on now chilling new developments and the disappearance of Saudi journalists turn off the show because soon after khashoggi failed to emerge from the consulate his fiancee called a close advisor to turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan when he gave my name to his fancy that if in any case and taking place wrong he should call me and indeed when she called me it was too late Tuesday my email and my whatsapp started blowing now people asking have you seen the news haven't you have you heard this feeling being on the Shimada they booed the hottest chick today there are kids get to my side all the put a pic diminish but on mom didn't know challengeable initiative the beating heart of the interior gifted women all over the big available to make leo do well telephone Arab and it was also about the Cayenne wagon if there didn't mother bang video room chick motherboard and chick mother to baby shake a baby he said tomorrow an interrogation consoles to Commander muchacha the Romeo and at that point we thought well maybe this is some type of a detention or maybe even some rendition where they would catch him and they would take him back to Saudi Arabia so we thought we had to move very quickly we reached out immediately the White House and they immediately reached out to their Saudi counterpart and made enquiries and and even transmitted a letter that I'd sent to the Crown Prince to make sure that it reached he never responded I had subsequent conversations with the vice president secretary of state others at the State Department and at the White House and in each case we express the urgency in moving on this initiative to take an impeachable ahead although masseuse doctrines non-german a German lab is ambition dirt ensures back attend GTOs initiative Saudi Arabia's response after Jamal disappeared was to say that they had no idea what had happened to him that he had walked out of the consulates that they didn't know where he went after that and that they were in fact worried about him the White House was very reluctant to talk about it but essentially said well we're gonna talk to the Saudis and we're gonna figure out what's going on here within days Turkish officials were insisting that khashoggi had been brutally murdered undermining Saudi assertions that khashoggi had as far as they knew left the consulate unharmed October the 6th word came out of this town poem that he'd been killed and the reports were that planes had been sent from Saudi Arabia with crews including a physician that were waiting for him we immediately demanded to talk to the Saudi ambassador and he agreed to meet in fact he came to my house in Georgetown he offered a series of explanations he said that Jamal left the consulate within 30 minutes I said well can you show us the video show us the video that's time-stamped that shows him X name because we have video show I'm going in and he said well our system was broken so we have no way to retrieve it it turned out that every single thing that I've been told by the Saudi ambassador was false on October 11th the Washington Post reported that Turkey had told US officials it had audio recordings from inside the consulate proving khashoggi had been killed when khashoggi returns to the consulate you know he he approaches the consulate he asks his fiancee to stay outside gives her a number to call if there's any problem goes inside and according to people who have heard or read the transcript he's greeted kind of warmly initially he is even asked if he wants some tea but he's already sensing something is wrong in the inside his response is basically yeah I'll take some tea but there's an edge to it that suggests he knows that this is more than just a routine kind of nicety this is a team of operatives from Saudi Arabia that come with a syringe loaded with enough sedative to be lethal there's a struggle he maybe tries to resist and and you hear him struggling trying to hold on to life hold on to breath and then that struggle ends so what happens next in the consulate is it just goes quiet and it sounds like there are some regrouping going on among this team the commotion starts again then there is a sound of some sort of electronic device saw something something is happening that suggests that they are trying to find a way to dispose of Jamal's body there is this excruciating noise it's unclear what happens next it's um you know what happens to Jamal's body is one of the one of the lingering mysteries here Saudi Arabia has maintained throughout that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman had nothing to do with the murder at first the kingdom claimed keshavjee was killed but in an accident surah al-anbiya Ali a heart attack a cattle illegalities rotten ear battle mode or st elmo Ottinger melbourne ahmed anul Murata shuttle at Eton Mess been Habana la casa latina arbol woohoo Athena Ottawa Judicial Council et al v conciliate imam laka al arabiya terentyev istanbul at that Allahu dhul Hijjah in West I became bill a demon rotten German at the Illawarra te rahim Ajala the kingdom changed its story at least two more times it acknowledged that its agents had killed Khashoggi in a premeditated operation then it said that its agents had been ordered to bring cash og back to Saudi Arabia alive but ended boredom denied this year salary Darlene volu ninguna is an economist nice theorem Jemma reaching a dilated to insanity awesome envisioned as a senior Louisville hockey coach a oth carmenza fine live under this year selfie damage the nod I scarcely commitment a yard enjoyed it so when Trump appears early on in a in a sort of press conference on the White House grounds he firmly denied any knowledge of it he didn't really know maybe I don't want to get into his mind but it sounded to me like maybe these could have been killers and that's that's the exact idea that the crown prince is trying to advance from Riyadh he is doing the crown prince's kind of propaganda or talking points for him in that moment if they knew about it that would be bad if they didn't know about it things bad things can happen so right after Khashoggi is death i mean i think you start to see a split a fissure in the US government so for for US intelligence agencies their job in a situation like is is to try to figure out as best they can what happened and one of the things first things that is found is that there's this historic record of communications being intercepted suggesting that the Saudis we're trying to lure keshavjee back but this is sort of information that is coming in as part of this glut of signals and phone calls and emails that the United States intelligence services intercept every single day so nobody really sees this until after it's too late and also there is this audio recording now from inside the consulate that firmly helps lay the blame the CIA director Gina Haspel goes to Turkey to meet with Turkish intelligence officials and to be able to hear this tape and probably return with a copy of it and it's not just the actual sort of physical evidence or the electronic evidence if you will it's also that the CIA pays very close attention to how Mohammed bin Salman operates the level of control he has over the government they simply cannot possibly believe these CIA intelligence analysts that this operation would have been a rogue and what I'm told is when the CIA presents this initial assessment to US officials and they are in fact struck by how confident the CIA is that Mohammed bin Salman was the one who was to blame for this you know for the Trump administration Saudi Arabia is the linchpin to their Middle East strategy right it is a strategy that's focused on hurting Iran for Trump I mean he sees Saudi Arabia as this rich Kingdom that he can hopefully get some money from Saudi Arabia is our partner they're our ally I do think this that I worked very hard to get the order for the militaries 110 billion dollars it's a very simple equation for me I'm about make America great again and I'm about America first president Trump's relationship with the Saudis actually predates his time in office well before he ran for president he talked on the campaign trail about having great relationships with Saudis Saudi Arabia and I get along great with all of them they buy apartments for me they spend 40 million 50 million am I supposed to dislike him I like him very much when he comes into the White House he is pushed particularly by Jared Kushner whose son-in-law senior advisor to make Saudi Arabia his first foreign trip which is very unusual but all throughout that trip there are these meetings between Jared Kushner and Mohammed bin Salman and that relationship really is the one that is kind of what underpins right now us-saudi relationships so there is a call that jared has with Mohammed bin Salman after keshavjee is gone missing and is believed to be dead in which essentially the crown prince says I had nothing to do with it and it's important because it establishes this very firm high level on-the-record denial first first of all the crime was really painful to all Saudis and I believe it is painful to every human in the world that is a heinous crime that cannot be justified so it really means now that MBS is looking for the White House to back him up and that's precisely what the White House ultimately does is they back Saudi Arabia's version of events and they essentially have not deviated from that in November the CIA concluded with medium to high confidence that Mohammed ordered the assassination but president Trump seemed reluctant to accept the findings they did not come to a conclusion they have feelings certain ways but they didn't have the report and you can ask you can ask Mike they have not concluded nobody's concluded I don't know if anyone's going to be able to conclude that the crown prince did it but he's looking for proof that almost never comes in a case like this he's sort of trying to hold the US intelligence agencies to a near-impossible standard and use that to cast doubt on the work that they're doing and that's that's devastating to people at the CIA to analysts their primary mission is to bring the best possible information they can to the President of the United States so while Trump is saying maybe he did maybe he didn't and dismissing the intelligence community's findings here the CIA is sending its director straight to the hill and sharing that same intelligence those same conclusions with lawmakers there right now last week and said he had seen no direct evidence of the princes involvement I think Secretary Pompeo in mattis the lead of the president there's not a smoking gun there's a smoking saw I have zero question in my mind that the crown prince NBS ordered the killing if he was in front of a jury he would be convicted in 30 minutes on November 15th the Treasury Department announced sanctions on 17 individuals linked to cachaca G's death among them was Saud al Kitani the close ally to the Crown Prince that same day Saudi Arabia brought charges against eleven individuals but it has refused to publicly name the defendants and say whether senior officials are among the indicted on November 20th a bipartisan group of US senators invoked the Global Magnitsky Act it required the Trump administration to determine within 120 days whether the crown prince was responsible for cashew cheese death the Trump administration missed the deadline and instead issued a statement declining to submit a report in December senators passed a resolution blaming Muhammad for Khashoggi Chi's death joint resolutions passed unanimously the United States Senate has said that Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman is responsible for the murder of Jamal khashoggi I would much rather to see some form of democracy some form of accountability it is an important transformation that requires all of us to contribute to it to discuss it and no one should be jailed we have to seek democracy and most of the wars we are having today in the Middle East is because of our inability to agree on a leader democracy is the solution it's disheartening to to think that that a voice like his that is so prominent and so important can just be tossed away like that in a consulate if they thought he was a headache while he was alive now that he's dead baby today we announce an important new Washington Post initiative called the press freedom partnership using the reach of Washington Post platforms to champion the journalists who risk every day to expose the truth we can keep alive the noble work of Jamila Shoji well incidents like this just shocked all of us and it reminds us how dangerous the mission is that our journalists are pursuing and if they are harmed we will demand the truth and we will demand accountability from those who do that so this is the death of a single individual at some level and so it's this tiny kind of thing in a huge global constellation of bad things that happen all the time but the significance of this really stands out in in disturbing ways it's part in part it's because when when an American president has the impulse to downplay the murder of somebody who's trying to argue for freedom democratic reforms human rights in a place like the Middle East that has been deprived of this for decades and decades it's a dark time for people who are fighting that fight you [Music]

Channel: Washington Post

Views: 433,995

Keywords: jamal khashoggi, khashoggi, washington post documentary, washington post, world press freedom, journalists killed by, mohammed bin salman, mbs, the dissident, saudi arabia, post doc, turkey, saudi crown prince, trump, jared kushner, cia, gina haspel, saudi consulate audio recording, riyadh, a:world, t:Original, s:World, documentary, saudi, bin salman, bryan fogel, trump news, press freedom

Id: 9odU1lQ_w44

Length: 24min 51sec (1491 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 02 2019